No Joke: Fujifilm paper and film products to get massive price increase on April 1st

Fujifilm plans to increase its prices substantially on a day when customers are least likely to believe it: April Fool's Day. The price increase will affect the company's film and paper products globally starting on April 1, Fujifilm announced on Monday. Though price increases will vary based on market, photographers can expect a minimum 30% increase in film cost and 'double-digit percentage' photographic paper price increases.

In the company's announcement, Fujifilm President Kenji Sukeno explained:

Over the past several years, Fujifilm has faced the rising cost of raw materials and logistics. In the past Fujifilm has absorbed some of the costs by undertaking intensive structural reforms and communalization of production facilities, but as a responsible manufacturing company and to provide the high-quality products our customers expect, the company will institute a price increase.

The price increase will impact Fujifilm's color negative, color reversal, quick snap, and control strips film products, as well as all of its photographic paper products.

Comments

I think this has both good and bad effects, balancing it out in the end; The good being for Fuji that they can have more income and make their products more sustainable (and thus the market, perhaps). But of course the flip-side being that consumers will have to pay more.We're speaking of 30%, which is almost a third, which also heavily depends on what price-range we're looking at. - Are we speaking of sub-10 Dollar rolls, then the price-increase isn't big and anyone who uses plenty of film can sacrifice the cost of a roll of film on a batch of them. - Of course it's way more significant when we're speaking of the more expensive ones. But those tend to be purchased by professionals and they get a good return on their investment on equipment anyway.

Besides all that; If you do a quick search you'll find that there's an article on Fuji doing a price-increase anyway. 2013, 2014, 2016... So it seems like general inflation and not much of a shocker. - Keep supporting!

Good. They need to turn a profit on these product lines or they'll become extinct. It's expensive to maintain the equipment and supplies that are required for film production. They make good stuff and have a strong following, so I expect Fujifilm has determined that enough people will continue to buy at the new price to offset those who switch to cheaper products.

This is a typical marketing strategy prior to ceasing production. Many companies raise prices for product groups that will be withdrawn. This way you will raise profits while giving your customers time to shift their buying habits

I suppose a price increase is better news than a withdrawal from the business. We have seen what happens to a film company, that continues to sell its product at a loss and there is no benefit from that route, to us film photographers.

The people who this will impact is photographic students, who typically are running on a very tight budget. The effect of this will be to continue to push them towards digital. This means they will then miss out on learning some very basic and useful techniques.

Just scanned my last batch of self developed Pro 400H shot in my 1950's 645 folder. So much fun to shoot and the results are dazzling for portraits and landscapes! My cost per 645 frame is $1.25 including development, so worth it for my fine art collection, but obviously not for my travel stock or timelapse work. Film is a wonderful accompaniment to my digital work.

I heard Fujifilm would be discontinuing production of Pro 400H this October. Just ordered enough for next trip, maybe I will load up the freezer this month. But I would be happier with a 30% price increase if the alternative was complete unavailability of Fujifilm 120 film stock.

It's the little things like self adhesive versus lick and stick bands, legible numbers in my film back window and knowing that end of roll band will not break, unlike Ilford products which tear 100% of the time . Image quality aside, those are reasons I shoot Fujifilm.

Purchase a large quantity of film, and you can keep it in the freezer for years without degradation. Allow the roll to thaw at room temperature for 1 week before use. I can never get rid of my Mamiya 7ii system with the 43mm, 80mm, and 150mm lenses.On this latest news, I just ordered several 5pk Velvia and Acros films. I scan my own film with an Epson V750. What actually worries me is the vanishing E6 developers.30% price increase, doesn't mean elimination, just reflects lower volume and increased costs of chemicals.

Freezing helps but doesn’t stop the ageing process of film as film ages due to a combination of thermal degradation and background radiation. The freezer virtually halts the thermal degredation but unless you have a lead lined freezer it won’t impact the background radiation. It’s the background radiation that is responsible for the increase in grain you see as films age. Higher speed films are more sensitive to background radiation than slower, so freezing works very well on slow films but if you have high speed colour films, the freezer will minimize unwanted colour shifts due to thermal ageing but you will have to live with the increased grain.

Film will fog (loose contrast) over time in a freezer. Neither cold temperatures nor lead can block cosmic rays.

By occasionally comparing development results over time, development techniques can be altered to minimize contrast loss caused by long-term cosmic ray fogging. I imagine this is easier for B&W film than color.

I do have a lead lined box from my medical film storage days. One can line any box with lead sheet metal. I do agree that gamma radiation will get the better of film over time, but not before a solid 10 years. Ken Rockwell reports of using film he frooze from the 1908s without detriment. I can only vouch that one should be able to get 10 year shelf life in deep freeze.

I thought film was expensive enough - I had a shock when I saw Provia/Velvia 35mm for £13-14 a roll - I remember a time when you could buy 3 x Velvia plus processing vouchers for £19.99 from Fujifilm...

Question is when will Harman/Ilford increase their prices?

Noticed petrol has shot up in price again - let's hope May gets Brexit sorted so that Sterling can increase in value..

This is only a hunt for profit and they should remove "film" from their companyname. They lately make more business in beautyproducts than on photography, that's why it's concurring to the filmemulsions. Nothing more is responsible for the priceincrease. NO KAIZEN AT ALL, just sucking for money.

The hipsters always say film is not dead but there must be a number at which people will throw in the towel and just apply the film like filters to their digital captures. I can see some landscape users sticking with sheet film for a while as there is a real advantage to shooting with 8x10 sheets.

It depends how much you shoot. Right now, pros are fine paying $10-$12 per roll for pro stuff like Portra, Cinestill, and Provia and such. They don't spray and pray so they aren't shooting that many rolls per session, and they get paid/reimbursed for the film purchases.

But if you spam like 8 rolls at your cousin's bday party for fun, things can get expensive pretty fast. Digital might be better for the more enthusiastic shooters.

One more thing. Have you guys seen the eBay prices of old point and shoot cameras, made of disposable plastic? Check! Olympus MJU II up to $350 , Yashica T5 up to $500. Just a few years back they could be found on garage sales for $5-10 and even free . Not even talking about Contaxes T2 and T3 or Leica. So what’s 30% increase comparing to that?

Fuji is probably selling more film than they have in a long time. Hence it is probably seen as an opportunity to make more profit. A lot of the high end wedding shooters are doing fantastic work with Fuji pro 400h and have been doing so for quite some time. They have definitely done their share for setting the film market on fire!

I purchased a Contax G2 and two lenses for about 1300 recently. I never thought that I would pay those kind of prices for a film camera again. The old SLR's for some reason are dirt cheap still. A Contax RTS III goes for about 200. I Nikon F4s goes for about 150.

In addition, for those who use film labs, a quality develop+scan of 135/120 is between US $20 and $30. Even if film price increase is 50%, the final total cost increase of film+processing would be well bellow 10%...

There is a rising demand for film lately, so why not? I’d rather shoot a roll of Fuji Velvia for $20 over two rolls of Ektachrome for $10. The difference is huge! Nobody can reproduce Velvia , Provia or 400H , nor Fujifilm themselves in their dull digital film simulations. I just hope they bring back some films that they discontinued.

Does this mean we're closer to the point where Fujifilm changes its name to something without the word "film" in it? I'm surprised that they haven't done that yet, -at least for their digital products. It seems a bit strange to me to be selling digital cameras branded with a name with the word "film" in it.

It's unfortunate but understandable. It is more difficult to maintain profitability with the much smaller market for film. There's still a resurgence but it isn't enough to keep costs down. Transparency films are also more difficult to produce now than ever. I'll still buy provia in 4x5 but it will have to be less often.

It's possible our children and grandchildren WILL have to pay for the air if we carry on as we are. Perhaps they will say that now would have been a good time to pay Brazil for NOT cutting down its forests, as they make a lot of the air right now, but don't see anything for it.

There's a point at which the demand for a given product can decrease so much as to become a niche item. Niche items generally lack the volume infrastructure in their supply chain to help mitigate costs. Thus costs naturally increase.

Ever notice that companies always claim some oil prices hike, Brexit, China trade-war, etc. caused them to raise their prices; but then when the situation is over the prices remain high. How come we don't get news like, The trade- war is officially over and that means all camera equipment will reduce in price by 15%. Never happens. It's always, we need more money! But never relief or opposite.

Took 'm long enough, it went from a highly competitive arena in which prices were constantly under pressure to one where it is a niche product. Prepare to pay niche prices... feel free to feel special using it of course :)

I don't see this as an exit from the market, rather a smart re-pricing towards the new reality... in which they can make these changes with little impact. Though I'm glad I had my film days when it was almost free (especially working in a photoshop paying only cost-price for my own films).

Except that these people are using old cameras which have already been manufactured, so acquiring the resources to manufacture new digital cameras, with the harm to the environment that this entails, does not apply.

Also there are only 3 people left in this country shooting film, so it won't make much difference to the environment really will it?

Environmentally unfriendly? Yes. Just like buying a new digital camera every other year or so.

The life span of digital devices (be it cameras or even moreso mobile phones) is typically a lot shorter than that of analogue devices. Now, all that equipment, whether analogue or digital, has to be fabricated, too. And the ecological footprint of the production process is a very important factor compared to the footprint caused by the use of the device, particularly if it is to be replaced soon by a newer model.

Or in other words: Whether you shoot film or digital is possibly less important in terms of ecological footprint than how often you buy a new camera.*

* of course it depends on how much film you use and how many and what size prints you make and if you dispose in a correct way of your development chemicals or not.

By some convoluted logic we should still be driving old gas guzzlers from the 50s and 60s rather than driving hybrids and electrics.

I used to shoot a few thousand rolls of film a year... mostly 120. Plus sheets and hundreds of boxes of Polaroid. Just think of the environmental cost of manufacturing and discarding the packaging alone for that much film.

Wilu... Few people need to buy a new digital camera every two years. The Sony A7 is about 5-6 years old and is still for sale. Its features are competitive with latest Canon mirrorless. many photographers would find this camera useful for a good many more years. And it only costs $800.

Dude our planet is F**cked way beyond camera manufacturing. As this is a photography? (oops! I meant to say gear) related forum, did you happen to check out Edward Burtynsky's Anthropocene project? Definitely eye opening and worth a look at the very least! https://theanthropocene.org

Will this include Instax paper? (" all of its photographic paper products.")Scroll through the best selling Camera and Photo items on Amazon (this is an Amazon site). Every 3rd item is either Film or an inexpensive Film camera. In the top 100 FujiFilm has 28 film related products (Polaroid has several products too).

Film is still incredibly popular, at least with low cost cameras.

For comparison the best selling interchangeable lens camera is #112 on that list.

Yes, incredibly popular and I'm guessing it's a part of one of the taboo reasons digital camera sales are down across the board. So nice to see people rediscovering traditional analog and returning to the craft. There is a serious opportunity for the right camera manufacturer. As for now, there is probably no better time for fujifilm to raise the prices and if it helps keep production going smooth than so be it. Everything increases in price, housing, food, wages,..perhaps it is just keeping with the times.

Some on this site have made the argument that digital photography is more expensive than film photography. What with "need" to frequently replace obsolete digital cameras, own computers, and spend countless hours adjusting pictures.

So if that is the case, film is still quite a bargain despite these cost increases, right?

On the other hand, maybe that is not a very widespread calculation of costs for most photographers.

"Some" may have _made_ that argument but that doesn't make the argument true. Some continue to make the argument that vaccines cause autism, or that Barack Obama was born outside the US. Neither is true.

So one roll per week buys a new Z6 body every 2.76 years, 2 buys it every 1.39 years, and 5 buys it every 6.5 months. Adjust as you like for your favorite brand.

When I read film fanatics (I shot Hasselblad myself) they typically talk about scanning negatives, which means they are spending "endless hours adjusting pictures" ... of digitized film negatives. All I see there is that they first shot, then had to wait for their film to be processed and digitized. Let's not discuss the film look - that is not what this post is about.

Bulk rolling B&W film and developing it yourself it still pretty cheap. It's some of the color stuff that's increasing in price. As for the time involved in developing and scanning, I do it while watching TV, so I kill two birds with one stone! I also bulk load and develop color film occasionally (Kodak Vision3, the stuff used to film a few of this year's Oscar winners).

it depends how much one shoots. apart from trips away, many film shooters might only shoot 1 or 2 rolls per month. most do also shoot b/w film. as someone has posted you can develop b/w film at home. $6US for a 1L film developer can develop 12 rolls of film. you also need the stop bath (should) but you do need the fixer.

if one was genuinely interested in shooting film, at a controlled amount it's not too bad. after all look at the coffee and wines pple spend on.

Using HC-110 like I do for B&W, it costs about 25 cents a roll for the developer, I don't use a chemical stop bath (just water) and a gallon of fixer lasts for at least 100 rolls. That all adds up to practically free for the development. The costs really come later, with the printing (either in a darkroom, where paper gets expensive, or digital printing, where the paper and ink gets expensive). But printing digital images costs the same as printing scanned negs, and you have to factor the whole process in when comparing the two--from taking the photo to printing it--if you're into making prints (which every serious photographer should be).

Shooting bulk load b/w and processing it yourself is a pretty cheap way to go. You probably will only scan the "best" shots. Tri-X bulk film costs about $.12 per shot plus processing costs.

However, the quality of Tri-X at ISO 400 does not compare favorably to what I am getting from an APS C Sony A6000 at ISO 6400. And with the digital camera I can shoot in color or b/w. There is much more detail in the digital image when you don't apply grain to "match" the Tri-X look.

Alan, film grain is a lot different that digital "grain" (ie, noise). Digital is linear, film has a Gaussian distribution. And no filter I know of can match that (although that Fuji Acros in-camera setting sounds like it might be getting close). As for amount of detail, that's not something I care about. Others do care about it (or their clients do), and film certainly isn't for everyone and their goals with photography. The point is, film is by no means prohibitively expensive, if it's your preferred medium of expression.

Film grain is not enough different from the simulation for anyone to "reasonably" care about. You need to study the image highly magnified to see the small differences if any. And why are we worshiping or praising the look of grain anyway? That was something we used to try to minimize. I shot MF and LF with low speed film in order to get the most detail and finest grain. 35mm Tri-X became a style of course but it is not very special since everyone made those gritty looking pj style images countless times starting decades ago.

In my opinion, it is pretty ridiculous to bother to carry a quality 35mm FF film camera if the 400 ISO shots are barely getting a fraction of the detail from your lens. It limits you to one look that may be alternatively "overused/outdated" or "classic." Depends on the image and the viewpoint.

Alan, yes, that's some preliminary research on trying to recreate film grain, But as the study concludes, it's very limited right now. I does show how complicated is actually is, though. Things will get there at some point, though, I have no doubt. And as I mentioned, the Fuji Acros algorithm sounds promising, too. As for why anyone would want grain, some people are more in the Pictorialist camp, who were doing the "pj" look before photojournalism even existed.

I shoot film professionally. I have a fridge drawer full of film and replenish often. I don't really depend on Fuji's stuff but it's sad to see Fuji slowly creeping away from the market. I have like 25 rolls of Superia 400 left... might be one of the last batches for me. But I will keep buying S400 as long as it remains reasonably priced.

So is it not true that there is a resurgence in use of film as some people say?

What about the great demand by film users causing those guys in Finland to rescue 100,000 cameras? There seem to be these apocryphal reports that more people are using darkrooms, film cameras, etc. On the other hand Tetanol is closing up, Fuji is raising prices, and Kodak Alaris is trying to sell its film and paper division.

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